LIONSGATE Christian Bale, left, plays the rancher who agrees to guard outlaw Russell Crowe until the "3:10 to Yuma" arrives.

3:10 to Yuma (R) Lionsgate (117 min.) Directed by James Mangold. With Russell Crowe, Christian Bale. Opens Friday at theaters throughout New Jersey. TWO AND A HALF STARS

The boy has spent all of his life on a sod-buster's farm, raised on dreams and dime novels, and when he comes face-to-face with a real gunslinger, he looks up at him in worship. After all, he's read all those stories about good badmen. He knows how things really are.

"You're not all bad," the boy declares, stubbornly.

"Yes," the gunman tells him. "I am."

But this bad man needs to be put on a train to prison -- the "3:10 to Yuma" -- and in the movie of that same name, that's where the boy's father comes in. He's not a lawman; he's just a man in debt, hobbling around on a wooden leg and about to lose his farm. But the job pays $200.

And maybe, he figures, his son needs a better role model than some gunslinger.

''3:10 to Yuma" began as a sort of dime novel itself -- an early-'50s cowboy story, written at the beginning of Elmore Leonard's career and sold in the waning days of the pulps. Shortly thereafter it became a movie, with Van Heflin as the good rancher and Glenn Ford as the gunman.

Now, 50 years later, it's been remade. And for fans of old-fashioned Westerns -- the sort the studios used to make, before Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah and the ¤'60s made it hard to look at cowboys and Indians in quite the same way again -- it's a pretty satisfying ride.

The movie still has problems -- including the same big one its inspiration had. But for better than an hour-and-a-half, it rides hell-bent for leather.

Directed by James Mangold -- a long-time fan of the original -- who wasn't above stealing a few ideas from it for his less successful "Cop Land" -- the movie treads its familiar territory expertly. There are the noble pioneers and the evil railroad men, the upstanding farmwomen and the cowardly lawmen. Look at things from the corner of your eye and you can see bits of "High Noon" here, and "Shane" and the films of John Ford.

The script though -- credited to three different writers -- adds a few contemporary touches, from veterans' issues to childhood traumas. Rancher Dan Evans, it seems, was a member of the state militia who got mustered into the Civil War, where friendly fire cost him a foot and the government sent him away with a few dollars; gunslinger Ben Wade was an abandoned only son, who grew up hurt and alone.

Admitted, sometimes these character details get in the way -- every 20 minutes, it seems, the gunfighting has to stop so someone can tell us a story about their past. But they have managed to attract a few very fine actors to the leads.

Russell Crowe brings his usual hair-trigger moodiness to Wade; Christian Bale gives Evans a dangerous edge. And, as is usual with Westerns, the supporting parts are some of the richest, with the versatile Alan Tudyk as Doc, Ben Foster as the most psychotic of Wade's henchman, and a grizzled Peter Fonda as a dreaded Pinkerton man.

Eventually, however, like its source, the film finds it has written itself into a corner, with a story -- good man leads bad man to jail -- that's numbingly predictable. So, once again, one of its characters has to suddenly change, to throw things off balance. And when he does, about 10 minutes before the end of the picture, suddenly the first 100 don't seem to make sense.

But try to ignore that final-scene change of heart -- and some of the absurdly over-the-top gunfighting that precedes it -- and enjoy the rest of the movie while you can. It's got train robbers and noble homesteaders and hired guns and professional killers in duded-up duds and derbies. And, for a good long while, it expertly tells us the sort of comforting myth the movies used to tell, back when they were better at pretending they believed in them, too.